Is Hudson Yards the Mall of the Future?

New York's new gigantic luxury development embeds retail in everyday life. The developers are betting that this is how people will shop in the future.

It turns out that the Mall of the Future looks a whole lot like the Mall of Right Now. Sure, The Shops & Restaurants at Hudson Yards is located in a $25-billion development that takes up 28 acres on a previously left-for-dead plot of land on Manhattan’s West Side, billed as one of the largest private real estate development in America’s history. But on a visit to the future on a frosty morning earlier this week, it seemed suspiciously like the present. After strolling past a half-dozen places to buy a $10,000 watch, a high-end retailer that doubles as a florist, an exhibition space called Snark Park where Snarkitecture will house rotating art exhibits, I end up in a corner that could be in any mall in America: there’s an H&M that shares a wall with a MAC makeup shop. There’s a Zara, and down the hallway a Verizon shop neighboring another cosmetics powerhouse, Sephora. It's a mall!

In 2017, analysts predicted a quarter of all American malls would close over a five-year period. And yet Hudson Yards spent the past 12 years trying to crack what it means to be a successful shopping center—and all the preliminary data the project’s managers have collected hints that the problem has been solved. Ninety percent of the retail center is leased, with a mix of over 100 brands that expect 15 million to 22 million potential customers to pass through the center per year. And while Hudson Yards doesn't use the M-word, once you get past the massive development and find the Shops & Restaurants, it fits the classic definition: a collection of stores and dining options, a food court that’s been blasted from one central location to throughout the entire building. All of which begs the question: if large chunks of Hudson Yards look like the kind of mall closing daily across the country, what, exactly, has Hudson Yards figured out?

The answer requires us to zoom out—both figuratively and literally. Because Related Companies, the developer behind Hudson Yards, didn’t just spend the better part of this century erecting a mall. It built an entire city. Over the past few years, Hudson Yards buildings sprouted up slowly and jaggedly like baby teeth: there’s now the Shops & Restaurants (exactly that), 10 Hudson Yards (offices), 15 Hudson Yards (residences), 30 Hudson Yards (offices), the Shed (a venue for art and performances), 35 Hudson Yards (more residences, plus a hotel by Equinox), 55 Hudson Yards (offices), with several more skyscrapers still to come. “What we love about Hudson Yards and why we felt so confident is it's a city within a city,” said Cheryl Kaplan, the co-founder and president of footwear brand M.Gemi, which is putting its first permanent store in the development.

The concept at work is simple: if customers don’t want to go to malls, Hudson Yards will bring the mall to them—but only after replacing the Johnsons next door with a Neiman Marcus, and the grocery store with a cereal-slinging Kith Treats counter. The benefits flow in both directions: “What was the selling point to the retailers? That you have all these great office workers there,” said Brian Nitzberg, the leasing director at Related. “What's the selling point to the office workers? That you’ll have this great retail environment right at their fingertips.”

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The pitch was effective. When Kaplan inquired about putting a store in Hudson Yards, she was asked, Why you? Developers wanted to know what would make the store special, or different from other locations. For many of the tenants on the mall’s “Discovery” floor—home to newer brands that mostly got their start on the internet—boasting that this would be their very first store was often enough. “By virtue of the fact that a few of us, on the emerging brand side of things, don't have physical retail, just being there was unique in and of itself,” said Brian Berger, the CEO of Mack Weldon, one of the bands renting out space on the Discovery floor.

Kaplan called the application process “healthy” when I asked how intensive it was. Still, that brands had even small hurdles to jump was the sort of detail that floored the brands I spoke with. In most malls these days, the only question those managing the space want to know is when they can expect a check. Nitzberg won’t explicitly say that brands were turned away, but notes that the space was heavily curated—and that I’m free to read into that how I like.

What the likes of everyman brands (M.Gemi, Mack Weldon, Stance socks) and the highest of high-fashion labels (Dior, Louis Vuitton, Fendi) are after isn’t so much a storefront in a mall as the opportunity to plug directly into the people who live, work, and will eventually shop at Hudson Yards. That last bit is crucial: the version of life proposed by Hudson Yards has been dramatically refashioned around commerce. The development is designed to make never leaving sound desirable, not a sign of madness. Tenants might wake up in one of Hudson Yards’ approximately 4,000 residences, grab a coffee at Blue Bottle, go to their office in another of the development's buildings, leave work, pop into British-based Dunhill to buy a jacket, wear it to dinner at Thomas Keller’s restaurant Tak Room, and then attend a Björk concert at The Shed. It’s seamless.

Brooks Brothers’ Mohit Gulrajani, the brand’s SVP of omnichannel strategy and operations, told me that the benefits of going into Hudson Yards are far greater than simply setting up shop and waiting for foot traffic to convert into sales (although the project’s developers expect plenty of that, too). The brand imagines itself integrating into the lives of its future customers. Say a clumsy office worker spills on his shirt before a meeting with the board: he can simply rush over to Brooks Brothers for a replacement. A resident in the towers who needs a new power tie can have one delivered via concierge. The brand can also partner with companies to set up shop in their offices, and sell clothes to employees who won’t even have to clock out to purchase a couple new Oxford cloth button-downs. Mack Weldon’s Berger envisions a similar future, in which guests at the first-ever Equinox hotel will forget to bring along socks or underwear—and his brand is the natural first call.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the customers brands will be plugged directly into are incredibly well off: the development’s corporate tenants lean toward the finance realm, and its residents have paid anywhere from $1.95 million to $13.845 million for the first condos. There are currently listings for $32 million residences, according to The New York Times. These details clarify why the entrance of Hudson Yards is wall-to-wall luxury, with stores from Rolex, Cartier, Patek Phillippe, and Watches of Switzerland. “It's not just the retail component that's very exciting,” said David Hurley, who oversees retail as Watches of Switzerland’s executive VP. “You've got a new community in terms of the office space that's being developed, the clientele, and the groups of companies that are opening up there, whether it's Boston Consulting Group or [the software company] SAP or Coach [the brand, which is moving its offices to Hudson Yards].”

Despite the built-in customer base, Hudson Yards’ greatest challenge remains an old-fashioned one: persuading customers who don’t live there to make the trek all the way over to its location on the West Side. On the morning of my tour, even Related’s CEO Ken Himmel confessed it took him an hour to get to Hudson Yards from the Upper East Side. He’s planning on moving onto the property soon, but most people living in New York don’t have that luxury available to them.

Hudson Yards has bubble wrapped itself as much as a mall in 2019 possibly can—but it’s still a mall. Its list of stores is impressive in its comprehensiveness, but at the end of the day those retailers face the same reality all shopping centers do: can’t customers do all this shopping without getting out of bed? Hudson Yards is banking on the fact that people will have enough reasons to pass through the area: the restaurants from acclaimed chefs, the event venue, and the High Line, a popular tourist attraction that brings in five million visitors every year on its own and will now pump customers directly into Hudson Yards like its own pulmonary artery.

You can’t forget the art either. One of the many jewels in Hudson Yards’ crown is what’s known as “The Vessel.” After climbing to the fifth floor of Hudson Yards’s shopping center, where the three-story Neiman Marcus merely begins, I peered out the massive glass windows, past the hanging Neiman’s logo, to the structure. The Vessel, which is described as a climbable sculpture, is a copper never-ending set of staircases that sends people up, down, and across. Like Hudson Yards itself, the sculpture is self-contained, sending those who step on through a beautifully interminable loop—the same way one-day residents of the development might never need to leave the place they live, work, eat, and, most importantly, shop.